Research Projects
Below are listed some of the current issues in marketing practice we are researching. We welcome enquiries from potential collaborators from industry or academia. Please also feel free to enquire about publications and courses which explain our findings so far.
Branding in a Changing World
We aim to address the widening gap between traditional brand value and customer value, the latter increasingly the result of factors not present when brand management was conceived and its practices first codified from its consumer goods origins. Increasingly, customer value today lies not only with the products we buy, it results from services and customer experiences in consuming our products and services. In both B2B and B2C environments, we are exploring questions such as: how does the corporate brand relate to the organisation’s vision and values, and what is the impact of corporate social responsibility? How should the employer brand be managed to attract, retain and motivate staff? How are brands built and experienced across channels? And in today’s B2B world, in which customer value is created by cross functional business processes and not merely product selling, how do B2B suppliers communicate their core competencies to buyers through their organisational brand?
Contact: Prof Simon Knox or Dr Stan Maklan.
Complex Relationship Selling and Key Account Management
In an increasingly complex business-to-business world where customers are becoming more powerful, more knowledgeable and more sophisticated, the way in which companies manage their relationships with key customers is vital. Previous research has suggested that long-term relationships can pay off for buyers and for suppliers. However, poor management of these key customer relationships can lead to damage to corporate profitability through over-servicing clients (higher costs) and loss of customer revenues (pricing issues, total loss of the customer, or customer migration to alternative suppliers). Cranfield has a leading position in research into relationship selling and account management, and through the Key Account Management Club as well as doctoral research, is addressing a number of practical issues to help our clients manage key customer relationships profitably. We are seeking companies to collaborate on research into new sales processes, KAM and global account management. We also provide unique courses in Relationship Selling, Key Account Management Best Practice, and Directing Sales and KAM.
Contact: Professor Lynette Ryals or Dr Javier Marcos.
Creating Customer Value-in-Use
In a seminal article in the Journal of Marketing, Vargo and Lusch documented the emerging consensus of marketing: we are moving from thinking of marketing as exchange to the notion of enabling customers to maximise the value from our goods and services as they use them. For example, people don’t want computers, they wish to be productive and accomplish tasks – hence the growth of IT outsourcing in the past decade. Using this perspective of value-in-use, we will come up with radically different business models. The nature of the brand promise will also change. Through doctoral research as well as research in collaboration with Cranfield’s Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre, we are exploring issues such as how companies can measure value-in-use, and how they can take the results of those measurements back into the firm to improve the value-in-use their customers gain from their products and services.
Contact: Dr Stan Maklan or Prof Hugh Wilson.
From the world’s first book on relationship marketing in 1991 to two recent articles on CRM in the world’s top marketing journal, Journal of Marketing, Cranfield has long led the way in Customer Relationship Management. Through our Customer Management Forum whose blue-chip members are working with us to move best practice in CRM forwards, and through doctoral research, we are investigating a range of customer management issues including: What makes a great customer experience, and what is the Return On Customer Experience? How can we turn customer insight into action at the front line? What is the role of segmentation in a one-to-one world? And, do CRM programmes work, and how should they be evaluated?
Contact: Dr Stan Maklan or Prof Hugh Wilson.
Multi-Channel Marketing
Today’s competitive strategy is based on innovation in the route to market as much as on innovation in the core product or service. But we have not seen the wholesale switch to remote channels which many predicted just a few years ago. Instead, we find ourselves in a multi-channel world. Issues we are investigating include: How can we deliver customer experience effectively across multiple channels? How should we organise for multi-channel customer behaviour, and how should we track it? What, for example, is the role of brand websites where the purchase may well be made offline? And, how can multi-channel strategy best be defined?
Contact: Prof Hugh Wilson or Dr Stan Maklan.
Risk and Return in Marketing
Which customers to acquire and to retain is a fundamental issue facing businesses today. The customers of a company can be thought of as a portfolio, analogous to a financial portfolio of stocks and shares. Many of the same principles apply to their management: how much should be invested in each customer or customer segment? Where are the greatest risks and greatest returns? How should marketing resource allocation decisions be made? We are conducting research to help managers answer these vital questions.
Contact:Professor Lynette Ryals.
Selling and Sales Management Effectiveness
Sales executives are facing increasingly demanding challenges that are triggered by profound changes in the business environment they operate, characterised by: customers having gained more power and gone global, channels having proliferated, more product companies selling services, etc.
Currently, conventional sales organisations and sales executives are under pressure for increased effectiveness and profitability. The sales function is key to stimulate demand for a company's products and services and to identify and exploit opportunities with clients.
Currently, sales people in business-to-business contexts are increasingly taking on the strategic role of relationship management, which emcompasses not just the direct contact with the client but a number of other value-ending activities.
We have conducted research in collaboration with selected companies into successful behaviours in sales meetings. We are also interested in exploring other aspects of effective selling and sales management, among others, team selling and sales leadership.
Contact: Professor Lynette Ryals or Dr Javier Marcos.
Strategic Communication, Propaganda and Persuasion
Closely linked to our branding work, we have a research stream on strategic communication, propaganda and persuasion. This includes the link between strategic communication and competitive positioning within an industry, exploring how companies project themselves at corporate level and what impact this has on their performance. We are also asking how companies, governments and interest groups project their special interest platforms and policies in order to best persuade target groups, as well as investigating strategic communication in government and political campaigning.
Contact: Dr Paul Baines.
Valuing Market Assets
Since 2005, throughout Europe and beyond, companies must value on the balance sheet acquired brand(s), customers and know how. Then they must reappraise these valuations annually and charge to income any loss in value. There are few, if any, robust valuation methods. We are exploring how firms should value their brand(s) and customer bases and how firms can separate brand value between product and corporate brands.
Contact: Dr Stan Maklan.
Please see also:
- Doctoral Opportunities in Marketing and Sales
- Cranfield Customer Management Forum
- Key Account Management club
- Marketing Measurement & Accountability Forum